Big data has moved from hype to reality, with 87% of network operators either having completed or currently implementing a big data analytics strategy, according to a report by Guavus.
Heavy Reading surveyed covered 81 qualified respondents working across a range of functions for 65 network operators as part of a multi-client study, including Guavus.
The primary drivers behind this increase in adoption include revenue maximization (66%), customer experience and loyalty (61%) and opex reduction (61%).
Within these areas, the main use cases that operators are looking to address in the next two years are proactive customer care (57%), revenue assurance (48%), targeted offerings (47%), and service assurance (44%).
The research further revealed that operators are focusing their initial efforts on combining disparate siloes of data across their organization. The biggest efforts are going on combining online consumer data, such as web browsing habits, with offline consumer data, such as billing history (31%).
The secondary area of focus is on combining customer data with network operations data (27%) to enable a correlation of factors, such as the relationship between network faults and subscriber behavior for contextual insights.
Further, the research identified that the key barriers operators are struggling to overcome as they implement their big data analytics strategies are the inability to integrate disparate systems of data (28%), poor data quality and management (25%), finding people with the right skill set to handle big data projects (22%).